Br Paul Noonan Formation Centre, Tamale: KUMASI HOLIDAY 24th

Friday, September 4, 2009

KUMASI HOLIDAY 24th – 29th June 2009

Three days after the Workshop at TICCS, we went for a four-day holiday in Kumasi accompanied by Brothers Henry, Frank and Prince.
Kumasi is the second largest city of Ghana and the former royal capitol of the Ashanti state. The major activity is business and Chui is widely spoken. We lodged at the Centre for Spiritual Renewal, Santasi Estate. It was a good quiet place except at night where we were terrified by the loud cry of the bush baby (a small bush animal with a cry of a child). While there we were grateful to receive a total sum of sixty Ghana cedis each from the community purposely meant for lunch and bus fare around the town. Each morning we celebrated the Eucharist together then had breakfast after which everyone was free to go where he pleased.

On Friday we all visited two religious communities, first the Spiritans then the Josephites (founded by St. Leonard Murialdo). Here we had a gracious opportunity to share in meal, prayer and stories with the novices and their formatters.

Kumasi is a Christian dominated place. I observed this when I was circumventing around the streets. It was interesting to discover the names given to shops and other business places. Most of them bore bible related verses. On one street alone, I noted examples such as, God’s Time supermarket, Angel Touch salon, Anointed Hands Aluminium ventures, Good Shepherd hotel, Jesus is Risen bar and many others.

Brother Frank was the lucky one among the group to receive a medal, from the Sisters, of the Ghanaian symbol GYE NYAME meaning, no one saw the beginning, and no one will see the end, except God. We came back on Monday morning.

(Chris Munialo)

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What do we want this novitiate to be?

There is a saying that goes something like this: “If we don’t do what we believe in, then we’ll end up believing in what we do”. Without a vision that is authentic and alive to guide our actions, then we can settle for rationalizing the status quo or what is convenient and comfortable.
One of the first things the new team in Tamale did was to spend time beginning to articulate its vision of a novitiate beyond the basics laid down in our Constitutions. Here are some elements of what we came up with:
Novitiate is a journey, a process that involves KNOWING, EXPERIENCING and CHOOSING.
It is an INITIATION into Christian Brother religious life, so a “rite of passage” into a new identity, a time of learning and testing.
Novitiate confronts the novices with the Brother’s vocation as a call to brotherly solidarity and community, not to privilege, status and security.
It involves exploration of the basic values of faith and vocation, and the challenge to embrace these out of personal conviction and free choice.
Novitiate means understanding that a religious vocation makes a claim on the whole of the person and his life, including his inner life, his relationships and his professional activity (ministry). Furthermore, it challenges the novice to see the dynamic inter-relationship of these areas and to learn what their integration means.
Novitiate is a time of DISCERNMENT. The novice learns more deeply who he is, and what this Christian Brother life is. There is a constant back-and-forth movement between these two poles as an answer is sought to the question, “Is this where I am meant to be? Is this the life that will enable me to find my true self in God?”